The Secret City eBook

That, however, was not now my immediate business—­enough
of that presently. My immediate business, as
I very quickly discovered, was to pluck up enough
strength to drag my wretched body home. The events
of the week had, I suppose, carried me along.
I was to suffer now the inevitable reaction.
I felt exactly as though I had been shot from a gun
and landed, suddenly, without breath, without any strength
in any of my limbs in a new and strange world.
I was standing, when I first realised my weakness,
beside the wooden booths in the Sadovaya. They
were all closed of course, but along the pavement
women and old men had baskets containing sweets and
notepaper and red paper tulips offered in memory of
the glorious Revolution. Right across the Square
the groups of people scattered in little dusky pools
against the snow, until they touched the very doors
of the church.... I saw all this, was conscious
that the stars and the church candles mingled... then
suddenly I had to clutch the side of the booth behind
me to prevent myself from falling. My head swam,
my limbs were as water, and my old so well-remembered
friend struck me in the middle of the spine as though
he had cut me in two with his knife. How was
I ever to get home? No one noticed me—­indeed
they seemed to my sick eyes to have ceased to be human.
Ghosts in a ghostly world, the snow gleaming through
them so that they only moved like a thin diaphanous
veil against the wall of the sky... I clutched
my booth. In a moment I should be down.
The pain in my back was agony, my legs had ceased
to exist, and I was falling into a dark, dark pool
of clear jet-black water, at the bottom of which lay
a star....

The strange thing is that I do not know who it was
who rescued me. I know that some one came.
I know that to my own dim surprise an Isvostchick
was there and that very feebly I got into it.
Some one was with me. Was it my black-bearded
peasant? I fancy now that it was. I can
even, on looking back, see him sitting up, very large
and still, one thick arm holding me. I fancy
that I can still smell the stuff of his clothes.
I fancy that he talked to me, very quietly, reassuring
me about something. But, upon my word, I don’t
know. One can so easily imagine what one wants
to be true, and now I want, more than I would then
ever have believed to be possible, to have had actual
contact with him. It is the only conversation
between us that can ever have existed: never,
before or after, was there another opportunity.
And in any case there can scarcely have been a conversation,
because I certainly said nothing, and I cannot remember
anything that he said, if indeed he said anything
at all. At any rate I was there in the Sadovaya,
I was in a cab, I was in my bed. The truth of
the rest of it any one may decide for himself....